While contractors focus on the works insurance and the contractual requirements, those involved in major construction projects are more focused on the design elements of the covers – the “DE” clauses in works policies and the extent of contractual cover insured by the professionals involved.
All parties to a building contract have very high standards to achieve on employee and site safety, and these, together with claims experience inform the peer to peer pricing differential of the employers and public liability insurances.
Increasingly lenders are looking at Building Guarantees for a 10 or 15 year period, and requiring all land right restrictions and potential liabilities, such as pollution, clean up to be insured.
Information
Contract Works
Building Guarantees
Employers Liability
Public Liability
Design Professional Indemnity
Liquidated Damages
Bonds
Contract Reviews
It is important to understand the extent to which liabilities entered into in commercial contracts are protected by insurance.
A key part of an insurance broker’s service is looking at insurance and indemnity clauses in contracts and providing informed comment.
Any commercially aware insurance broker will work with you to look at your contractual exposures
Paul Dickson
Innovation use a template approach to examine contract clauses, enabling the insured and uninsured exposures to be understood. This approach works just as well in both simple contracts like leases and more complex agreements like software supply or construction work
Considerations
- Leases
- Software contracts
- Service supply contracts
- Construction contracts
Motor
Site Plant, Non-negligent Indemnities
Claims Management
An insurance policy is only as good as the claim payment. Some claims however can be complex and protracted particularly liability claims.
Early notifications using the excellent claims notification services provided by insurers can often hugely reduce cost and disruption. On occasions however you will require guidance both from us as brokers, and from other professionals such as loss adjusters or lawyers.- and Innovation Broking have an arrangement with some tried and tested specialists to act on your behalf. For more information visit our claims page.
Unfortunately insurers have less expertise on the street to deal with complex claims than ever before – and this makes the role of the broker in delivering the correct expertise to you even more relevant.
Howard Pearson
It is possible to “pre book” the services of your own specialist loss adjuster working for you rather than for the insurers on larger property and interruption losses for a small additional charge. The current pressures many insurers are under to control claims costs makes this a very prudent purchase.
Commercial Insurance
The traditional risks of a business can normally be grouped under a “commercial insurance package” which combine a number of standard covers for assets, revenue interruption, cash, employers liability, public and product liability, and legal expenses. This grouping controls cost and enables very wide policy wordings and “add on covers” to be obtained easily and efficiently.
“In 40% of claims the business interruption interruption sum insured was too low by a factor of on average 45%”
Chartered Institute of Loss Adjuster’s Report, 2012
Whilst commercial policies are seen by many as straightforward they are far from this, often running to more than 100 pages of print. Particular attention needs to be paid to, inter alia:
- Basis of valuing assets
- Revenue sum insured calculation
- Supply chain dependencies
- Adequate business description
- Insurers standard security conditions
Risk Mitigation
Risk solutions are not all about insurance or loss control – indeed the vital “DNA” of the business may be acceptance of an unmitigated and uninsured risk.
Other risks can be easily controlled with a little work and assistance – thus reducing insurance cost, or avoiding the need for insurance at all.
Insurance is just a means of transferring unmitigated risk to another party. To keep insurance cost controlled mitigation opportunities should always be examined first.
Howard Pearson
There are a host of mitigation experts out there from cyber risk to fire engineering and we have created a network of these to bring the best to bear on your behalf. The more generic – like Health and Safety – can often be provided at a “no or low” cost due to insurers buying power.
Considerations:
- Health and Safety
- Fire Engineering
- Physical Security
- Cyber Risk Assessment
- Contract Reviews
- Continuity Plans
- Disaster Plans
- Supply Chain audits
- Pandemic Recovery plans
